Category Archives: After Karen

In dreams lately she’s back from the dead, no worse for wear, sometimes young and able-bodied . . . sometimes not. Last night she was young and able-bodied. I told her she was beautiful and I loved her. She said, “What do you love about me?” and true to form — I mean, it felt like the sort of banter we’d do in our courtship — I said, “I love your intellectual traits and your physical traits.” The sort of humor that Big Bang Theory cashes in on these days, but back then it would’ve felt fresh. She play-kicked me. We were watching a home video she’d shot as a child and there was something about it that made me cry. I think it wasn’t the video so much as the thought of her as a child, not knowing what her life would be, nothing but potential and hope. She saw me cry and apologized. Something like, “Oh, shit, I didn’t realize you’d be able to see me in the reflection” — and then I noticed it, too: young Karen with a camcorder (yeah, I know, anachronism), at most ten years old, reflected in the glass door of some storefront.

Later we were in an airport without enough time to make our connection. Must have been Vegas because I left her behind and ran through a vacant casino, my clothes peeling magically away the further I ran and I knew soon I’d be naked, running; thinking, oh how trite this is for a dream.

But first, a recurring memory: we decided to buy our first house in Boerne, Texas, while checking out another home closer to San Antonio. I remember we sequestered ourselves in their boy’s bedroom, sat together on the kid’s twin bed, and contemplated making a serious offer. It took us some time. We suspected the agent was hopeful that we were thinking about bidding on THIS house. I can almost remember details from the room . . . almost. And I keep remembering this scene, perhaps because it was one of the biggest decisions we’d made, and we made it together. (You’d think I would remember when we decided to make a baby together, but nooop.)

Dream last night: we were looking at another house, perhaps also in Texas. It was on a flag lot that tapered in the backyard — sort of trapezoidal layout, broad end toward the street, narrow end behind the home. I thought the lot’s square footage (something like 6800 sq ft) seemed a lot lower than what I really wanted. I imagined what the backyard might look like, but when I went to check it out, it was disappointingly small, dark, and poorly groomed.

The agent had some sort of faux European accent. She was fixing coffee in the kitchen for Karen and was boasting about how she had saved this special flavor for her. Seemed like a BS artist. I checked out the master bedroom: dark, but very large, and I could imagine us filling it up with reptiles and tarantulas. I worried that that might sell Karen on the house, since I wasn’t too impressed with it so far.

But it was nice, overall, being back in that pre-Jake world with a relatively normal (healthier) Karen, planning our lives together.

So I spent part of today, the second anniversary of Karen’s death, tending her tarantulas. A few of them are off their diet, so that worries me. But I’m feeding them more often than she fed them, so perhaps they’re molting more often? I hope so. I joined a tarantula group on Facebook. Hopefully they’ll give me some good advice.

A few days ago I had to watch the video, which I thought was my only video of Karen. But this one (beginning at about 2:00) has some good vintage Karen off camera. That’s her stern voice (but good-humored). If I just trust to my memory, all my traitorous memory provides is stern Karen without the humor. But that voice. It’s an anchor. It’s a key. It’s the only thing that gives me access to Karen-as-three-dimensional-human, which memory alone won’t provide. Of all the violence done by that last year or two, that’s the worst of it, I think: that the memories more often than not are harsh, or desperate, or lonely, or hopeless. It can be hard to remember why I was so crazy about her.

Her voice is in that third video, too (Chapter 3 of Lisa Altalida’s Idiots Guide to Dating Girls). But I can only take so much of this.

Maybe it’s all for the good. If I carried within me an accurate representation of Karen-in-her-prime, the sense of loss would be unbearable. And yet sometimes I need to feel that loss and all of that pain. While I’m awake it comes in split-second flashes. In dreams, rarely, it all comes out. A real downpour.

All I’m certain of is that I miss her and I can’t have her. And that she faded away from me for at least a year or two before she died, and I didn’t fully realize it until she was gone.

For both of us, the wedding was an annoyance (we thought the Buddhist reverend was a twit) and the reception was chaotic. We didn’t get to enjoy the string quartet we’d insisted upon. I have a dim memory of us roaming from table to table, socializing with Karen’s relatives. There was a mini-scandal when one of her female relatives combed her hair with a dinner fork. Another mini-scandal afterwards, when one of the presents was a vase with WITH THANKS FROM SUMITOMO BANK written on its underside.

It was a blur, even at the time — not just a matter of the passing years smudging it all into a kaleidoscopic memory; it was kaleidoscopic even then. The hotel where we had the reception gave us a honeymoon suite with an enormous hot tub. Karen always claimed that her dad looked sick when he saw the honeymoon suite, as if he could imagine his little girl getting defiled soon afterward. We had an okay wedding night, no major olympic feats; we were both tired, and even then she lacked the stamina to have a full day of excitement followed by a night of the same.

She was a beautiful bride. She always did pretty-up nicely with makeup, and she did it so rarely I’d joke she was a different woman. The woman I fell in love with didn’t wear makeup. Not that I minded . . . although there was always that little trace of “what the hell are you doing with me” in the back of my mind.

And even now there are flashes when I don’t realize she’s gone. I was looking at a locum tenens headhunter email the other day. They wanted someone to cover a Northern California facility for various dates in the Fall. I thought about what life might be like post-retirement, and whether I might want to do a gig like that . . . and I had a moment’s concern about how rough it might be for Karen to accompany me on such trips. Travel wasn’t easy for her.

Two in the last two days, but these haven’t felt like supernatural visitations so much as lectures from my subconscious. Fuck you, subconscious.

***

I found her in a hospital bed, but she looked good nonetheless. She reminded me of how she looked in her hospital bed after she’d delivered Jake. I looked at her wristband and the date was October 2014. So: not dead yet, but not long for this world. Post strife. I was back in time and I had another chance — to apologize, to profess my love, something. I was tearful, agitated, and she knew something was up. She got out of the bed and we walked together — dream transition, now we were in our house, putting our shoes on. I hugged her and told her, “You mean more to me than anything. You know that, don’t you? Tell me that you know that.” But she wouldn’t respond. She wanted to talk about a project for the backyard. “You need to do something about that big pile of soil. Build that island already and be creative. I know you can do it.” We talked about looking on the internet for images so she could show me what she wanted.

You wouldn’t celebrate Mother’s Day because you considered it a manufactured holiday. Didn’t stop you from celebrating Father’s Day, of course. Your preferences were your preferences, and mine were mine, and God forbid I should be at all critical of yours.

I think of the some of the movies you watched repeatedly: The Heiress, perhaps, or Resident Evil, or even (inexplicably to me at the time) Titanic. And it all makes sense now. The protagonists were all survivors, and often badasses. There’s no doubt in my mind that in your strongest moments, you wanted to survive. Maybe even in the weaker moments, too, and maybe even in the face of the gruesome logic that none of us survive for long. You certainly beat your own expectations. But I wish you would have beaten the odds a while longer.

Sometimes I can feel you inside me, so keenly.

Happy Mother’s Day. You have to suck it up now and not grumble about it.

That X-Files poster has always struck me as sad verging on pathetic. I want to believe seems a concise way of saying, This is something I wish were true. I know it’s not, but damn it, I want to believe. That’s how I feel about life after death. I want to believe that Karen has some sort of existence outside of my own mind, that she’s really out there, watching over me. Because that means I may see her again and say all the things that went unsaid. Hard to believe there’s anything left to say, after all the talking we did. But maybe what’s missing is her belief. Such a simple statement: I believe you.

I dreamed last night that Karen had been away a long time. It was late at night, the house was dark, and as I went through the doorway into my bedroom she was standing at the verge. I made some sort of startled exclamation, then hugged her tight. After a while, she hugged me back. And then we went to bed. She was back.

Maybe she’s happy with me for taking care of the tarantulas yesterday (but I’ve done that many times). Maybe she approves of how I’m handling things in my life. Or maybe it’s all just random meaningless chatter. But I want to believe that was really her. It felt real enough.

So there’s this dramatic concept known as “the crucible,” which is, your characters are confined somehow, can’t escape their situation. A life raft. A house or room where going outside is unthinkable. A dead-end job where the alternative is starvation.

Grief is like that, I think. It’s there all the time and you can’t escape it because you wouldn’t want to, because not feeling would be so much worse.

It colors everything. Happy memories become bittersweet memories. Sad memories become harrowing memories. It colors fantasies, too. A few days ago, I thought at length about what I would do if I were back in my 22-year-old body, getting together with Karen for the first time. Would I do it all again? Of course. I love her. But then I was faced with the agonizing question: what do I tell her? How much do I tell her about the pain in store for her? About how much she will lose . . . ultimately everything? But would I have the strength not to tell her? The fantasy sucked. As much as I might like to live through those years, both for the joys of those years and for the chance to do it better, to be a better husband, I couldn’t do it. The joy would be poisoned by the knowledge of what was still to come.

I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. After all, we always knew that a bad end was likely. We knew this most acutely in those first six years, but after a while, I think we both started to hope. Hope kept us going. Could I do it all again, knowing the hope was pointless?

One of my pen pals wrote me that I sound like I’m doing better. I reread my letter to her. It did indeed sound upbeat. Maybe I am doing better. Maybe I dissemble well.